Does anyone know of an inkjet printer that will still print black if a color cartridge is empty?

Not that I am aware of. I have used both Epsons and HPs and if one of the cartridges is empty, it stalls everything.

HP is even nastier in that it won’t print if the date on the cartridge has been passed. But that’s another issue.

Wish I had an answer for this as well. I just fought with a printer yesterday trying to print a black and white document but couldn’t cause I was out of magenta. -_ -.

@elbanditoroso, @El_Cadejo Amazing, those two issues are exactly the difficulties I am having at home. I have a black ink cartridge, 940XL, that still has a bunch of ink in it but the date is past now actually, as I recall the HP machine was none too happy that I used a store brand cartidge in the first place

AND at the same time, the magenta cartridge ran out of ink it is always magenta, what is it with that color anyway?, so now, unless I go down and spend $50.00 bucks for two new cartridges I have an expensive paperweight.

@rojo – I don’t know why Magenta runs out first…

But it’s all about selling expensive ink. I read somewhere that if you priced printer ink by the gallon (based on HP prices) you would be spending something like $1200 for a gallon of magenta. Maybe more.

Have you tried going into the more advanced print options (once you’ve hit “Print”) and changing the colour to “grayscale”? That might force it to ignore the state of the colour cartridges.

But yeah, I’ve been irritated by this before as well. Black means black.

Some Epson and HP printers can. You select it in the printer driver preferences as greyscale and then there’s an extra box that’s for using the black ink only. Inkjets default to using the colour ink as it improves the quality of the printout.

My HP printer will only warn me that a cartridge is empty. It will not stop trying to print with the remaining.

At least, so far, it hasn’t.

Mine did….

I have an old Canon S900. Although it stops and pops up with an alert when a colour cartridge is empty, it is possibly to manually override this with a push of a button on the printer.

I’ve no idea about newer models.

Went back and changed it to grey scale, found the override to go to “black only” did that. Still no luck. Oh, and here is an interesting little factoid: evidently the on/off switch will not function as long as you have an error message (at least one relating to Magenta) so you can’t re-boot it and see what that does. You can however unplug the damn thing and wait for it to go through its interminable start-up cycle.

BTW this is an HP OfficePro 8500. Care to guess which brand I will not be purchasing when replacement time comes, which may be sooner than it imagines. I own a fully functioning ball peen hammer.

I refuse to play the inkjet game anymore. I went with a laser printer and simply pay for color copies and photo prints.

@whitenoise , @Dutchess_III what brand/style printer do you have? Is it an older model?

Gosh…it isn’t the one I have now, so I don’t know. If I was out of color ink, I’d just change all my document to black font and B/W pics. I know it wouldn’t print if a cartridge was missing, so I left the empty color cartridge in.

I bought HP ink.

HP officejet 6510 if I’m not mistaken.

(I’m in Milan and my printer is about 6,000 km away.)